celebrating nature & exploring humaness with illustrated poems

Unremarkable

This is my first time at Riverview Natural Area. It is like a
neglected patch of woods behind someone’s house—growing over with
ivy, crisscrossed with ill-planned trails. I expect to see a few
tree-houses and forts but they’re absent. At least the city took
the time to number the trails and mark them with laminated paper
stapled to stakes.

I feel like a neglected patch of woods myself, overgrown with the
desire to not feel my own reality after heartlessly severing a
six-year friendship because it housed an on-and-off romance that kept
me from getting on with life.

It’s nice to be out under the trees even if everything seems
unremarkable in the light of my mood. I cross a log so wide I just
sit on it and swing my legs over. I stand up to find a big, wet spot
of fresh bird poop on my camel-colored corduroy skirt. This would
normally be funny. A bird-lover is eventually going to meet with bird
excrement, it’s required. But it’s squishy and I feel oddly
embarrassed about walking the trails and riding my bike home with a
poop spot on my skirt, as if people will know and assume it’s my
own.

I pour most of my water bottle out while trying to rub the debris
out of the soft ribbing in my skirt then keep walking, unconcerned
that I might now look like I peed on myself.

The trail starts to head steeply downward toward Macadam and I
consider that I just rode my bike up this same slope through the
cemetery, that I had to rest a few times along the way and that I may
not be happy arriving at the bottom to have to climb all the way back
up again.

I turn around, resigned to an unremarkable walk getting acquainted
with a new place. Getting up to date on my requisite encounters with
bird poop. Doing the best I can to to reckon with the edges of
emptiness around a pain in my heart that will slowly fade in the
recognition that the hardest way isn’t always the most noble.